USC Standard Patient Hospital

USC Standard Patient Hospital, under development, is a free online community where medical students, residents and physicians can improve their interview and diagnostic skills with a Virtual Standardized Patient (VSP). For the learner, the hospital features a variety of different patients, useful performance assessments and guidance and improvements. For medical educators, the hospital features USC Standard Patient Studio, an online collaboration and authoring community.

The goals of USC Standard Patient Hospital:

Create the most functional and natural virtual standardized patients in history

Create a critical mass of conversational patients as a free national resource

Allow for effective natural language interaction with learners

Improve medical interviewing & diagnostic skills

Create VSPs that can be authored rapidly by non-computer scientists

Vastly improve assessment and performance feedback

Free up resources to more effectively utilize human standardized patients

Conversational Virtual Standardized Patients

Our Virtual Standardized Patients (VSPs) are based on SimCoach virtual human technology. VSPs converse in natural English, understand what you tell them and can express themselves non-verbally through facial expressions and gestures. The system can create patients with a range of personalities including average, sullen, loquacious, uncertain, reserved and neurotic.

Educational Approach

The assessment system is revolutionary and provides specific, useful feedback to the learner. The ability to provide the student with a detailed & complete, objective assessment and guide them with specifics on how they can perform better is a major advantage of our approach over human standardized patients. This emerging capability is unprecedented and has the potential to rapidly mature new clinical interviewers.

Work depicted here was sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL). Statements and opinions expressed and content included do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.